Tommy's Granny [View All]

By Uri Avnery
01 June, 2004
Gush Shalom

Sometimes a person "buys his world in one moment," as the ancient Hebrew saying goes. This was done by the Minister of Justice, Yosef ("Tommy") Lapid, when he uttered the words: "This old woman reminds me of my grandmother!"


This old woman, an inhabitant of the Rafah refugee camp whose house was demolished by the Israeli army, was immortalized by the camera while rummaging through the ruins of her home in a desperate search for her medicines. Two days later, journalists found her at the same place, still looking for her medicines under the debris.


Tommy's grandmother perished in the Holocaust. He himself was born in a Hungarian region in the north of Yugoslavia and survived the Holocaust in the Budapest ghetto. When he mentioned "my grandmother", it was quite clear that he meant a victim of the Holocaust.


The phrase kicked up a storm. It may well have been the straw that broke the camel's back and induced the government to call a halt to the ongoing atrocity in Rafah.


Of course, the situation was ripe for that. The pictures of the killing and destruction in the poor town filled the TV news bulletins and newspaper pages throughout the world. The Al Jazeera TV station showed them several times every hour to tens of millions in the Arab world. In the Western world, too, the screens were full of them. The accumulated impact was terrible - the Israeli army was shown as an inhuman machine that destroyed the lives of hundreds of families without even noticing. The picture of a small boy struggling with a huge suitcase in an attempt to save some of his family's belongings says more than a thousands words of the official army liar.


http://www.countercurrents.org/pa-avnery010604.htm